pictured an Observatory. He says--

"'Tis late; the astronomer in his lonely height,
Exploring, all the dark, descries afar
Orbs that like distant isles of splendor are."

He notices a comet, and calculating its orbit, finds that it will return
in a thousand years--

"The star will come. It dare not by one hour
Cheat Science, or falsify her calculation;
Men will have passed, but, watchful in the tower,
Man shall remain in sleepless contemplation;
And should all men have perished in their turn,
Truth in their place would watch that star's return."

Ernest Rhys well says of a student's chamber--

"Strange things pass nightly in this little room,
All dreary as it looks by light of day;
Enchantment reigns here when at evening play
Red fire-light glimpses through the pallid gloom."

And the true student, in Ruskin's words, stands on an eminence from which
he looks back on the universe of God and forward over the generations of
men.

Even if it be true that science was dry when it was buried in huge folios,
that is certainly no longer the case now; and Lord Chesterfield's wise
wish, that Minerva might have three graces as well as Venus, has been